Propionaldehyde is used as a solvent raw material, a chemical intermediate product, a solvent for production of pharmaceutical intermediates, etc., and it is an important substance in the chemical industry. Propionaldehyde can be obtained by a hydroformylation reaction of ethylene (Non-Patent Document 1). It can also be obtained by partial hydrogenation of allyl alcohol as a raw material.
However, the construction of a hydroformylation reactor requires enormous capital investment. In addition, when propionaldehyde is obtained by partial hydrogenation using allyl alcohol as a raw material, part of the carbonyl moiety is also hydrogenated and the selectivity of the target product may be lowered in some cases. There is also known a method of dehydrogenating 1-propanol to obtain propionaldehyde (Non-Patent Document 2), but there is a problem in supplying 1-propanol as a raw material.
Under such circumstances, a method of synthesizing propionaldehyde by using 1,2-propanediol as a raw material and using a heteropolyacid or heteropolyacid-catalyst carrier complex as a catalyst has been studied. (Patent Document 1).
The present inventors have proposed a method for producing a saturated aldehyde from 1,2-alkanediol in the presence of a regular mesoporous material (Patent Document 2). This method is particularly a method of synthesizing propionaldehyde from 1,2-propanediol.